Nobel Prize Winners Analysis

Introduction

The Nobel Prize is five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to ”those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Nobel Prizes are awarded in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace.

Let's see what patterns we can find in the data of the past Nobel laureates. What can we learn about the Nobel prize and our world more generally?

The dataset is available here

Import Statements

Notebook Presentation

Read the Data

Data Exploration & Cleaning

Check for Duplicates

Check for NaN Values

Add a new column converting "Prize Share" into %

Convert Year and Birth Date to Datetime

Plotly Donut Chart: Percentage of Male vs. Female Laureates

The big difference between the number of male vs. female laureates can probably be explained by social factors.

Who were the first 3 Women to Win the Nobel Prize?

The well-known Marie Curie is the first woman who has won the Nobel Prize, it was in 1903 in the Physics category.

Find the Repeat Winners

Marie Curie is also one of the rare people who has won the Nobel Prize several times as an individual, with John Bardeen, Frederick Sanger and Linus Paul Carling.

Number of Prizes per Category

Many more prizes seem to have been awarded in the Medicine category compared to the Economics category, let's try to find out why.

It seems like the Economics category is much more recent than the other ones, which explains the difference in terms of awarded Nobel prizes.

Male and Female Winners by Category

Number of Prizes Awarded Over Time

There are many more laureates than before, the number of awarded prizes has been increasing constantly despite a gap during the 1st World War and during the 80s (maybe due to the Cold War era ?). Let's try to explain it.

Are More Prizes Shared Than Before?

Thanks to the (reversed) Prizes Share line, we can easily explain this Awarded Prizes Average increase over time. Nowadays, Nobel prizes simply tend to be more "shared" between different contributors.

The Countries with the Most Nobel Prizes

The United States of America is the country that "produced" the most Nobel prizes laureates, far above United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Number of Prizes Won by Country (Map)

If we take a look at the map, we can notice that the richest countries produce more Nobel prizes laureates. Once again, it can probably be explained by social factors.

In Which Categories are the Different Countries Winning Prizes?

Now we are deeper into details, we can notice that the US dominate every category except the Literature one, lead by France ! It's interesting to see that some countries seem to do much better in a specific field, such as Medicine for Australia, Physics for the Netherlands or Chemistry for Israel.

Number of Prizes Won by Each Country Over Time

We can notice that European countries (France, UK and Germany) were leading the ranking until the end of the 2nd World War. After that, the US took the lead and never let it go.

What are the Top Research Organisations?

Once again, the US are leading this ranking with the 5 top research organizations, the first non-american one being the University of Cambridge (in England), at the 6th position.

Which Cities Make the Most Discoveries?

Cambridge (in Massachusetts, USA) is the city that "makes the most discoveries", it can be explained by the fact that 2 of the top research organizations (the MIT and Harvard) are based in Cambridge

Where are Nobel Laureates Born? Chart the Laureate Birth Cities

We can see this ranking is a lot different and contains bigger cities/capitals, that's because the research organizations are usually located outside of big cities.

Plotly Sunburst Chart: Combine Country, City, and Organisation

This chart is interesting to have more details about each country's Nobel Prizes. If we compare France and Germany, we can see that most of French research organizations that got a prize are based in Paris (the capital) whereas it's more spread out in Germany.

Patterns in the Laureate Age at the Time of the Award

How Old Are the Laureates When the Win the Prize?

Who were the oldest and youngest winners?

Descriptive Statistics for the Laureate Age at Time of Award

In 2019, John Goodenough became the oldest Nobel Prize laureate, at the age of 97 years old ! In 2014, the Pakistanese Malala Yousafzai became the youngest one at 17 years old. She's an exception of course, because laureates tend to be generally quite old, with only 25% of laureates who were younger than 51 years old !

Age at Time of Award throughout History

We can notice that Nobel prizes laureates tend to be much older nowadays than before. The average "Laureate Age" was around 55 years old until the 50s, but it is now close to 70 years old.

Winning Age Across the Nobel Prize Categories

We can observe different patterns for the evolution of the average Laureate Age in each category of the Nobel Prize. It generally tends to be older, except for Economics that remains constant and for Peace, now 10 years younger than at the beginning of the 20th century.